My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

So what are the questions?

1. What’s going well for you?
2. What are you trying to ignore?
3. What’s Boring you?
4. How do you want to be remembered as?
5. What do you love?

5.75… what’s next?

Another great video from floramacdonald

Amazing video!! Love love love! Are you having fun yet?

Challenge:Future is an international youth competition that connects corporate and global challenges with the power of student-driven innovation.
Imagined as a multi-year open innovation competition, each year Challenge:Future focuses on one specific theme, a universal challenge to be re-imagined and re-invented.

Challenge:Future – Challenge the Future, Shape the Present from Challenge:Future on Vimeo.

Book Title: Life Lessons for Mastering the Law of Attraction – 7 Essential Ingredients for Living a Prosperous Life
Author: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Jeasnna Gabellini, Eva Gregory
Year written/published: 2008
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Some extracts:

Thinking and Feeling…

Look back over your life once gaain and notice the correlation between what you were thinking and feeling and what you were getting in life… Think about this. There is no exception to this law anywhere in the Universe. Absolutely None! It is a law of physics.

the how…

By focusing on the how at this stage, you stop the process that moves you towards realizing your dreams. … In going to the how, you are trying to control your future instead of creating your future.

Intention and the results…

You don’t give up the intention, and you don’t give up the desire. You give up your attachment to the result.
~ Deepak Chopra

You are always at choice…

Do not settle for anything less than what you really want. You are declaring your worthiness. If you think something is not possible or is out of your reach, you’re probably not going to commit much energy and resources to accomplishing that goal. When you decide a desire is possible and you are  ready to have it, the Universe will assist you in having it unfold with ease.

forgiveness…

I came to understand that if you cna’t forgive someone, you cannot be open to abundance. If you are holding on to revenge, love can’t walk in. If you are hanging on to resentment, you are hanging on to being a victim. And if you are holding on to being a victim, there’s no space in your mind to be a victor.

Life, the teacher…

“when the student is ready, the teacher appears”. The teacher, however is not always a person. Sometimes the teacher appears simply as life, circumstances or synchronicities. I call them road signs, those apparently random events that show up in my life that bet to be notice.

money…

Money never starts an idea; It’s the idea that starts the money…
~ Mark Victor Hansen

Book Title: Harvard Business Review on the Innovative Enterprise
Author: HBR Publishing
Year written/published: 2003
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Summary: How does/can corporations build innovative and creative cultures within their organisations?
Some extracts:

Time-Pressure/Creativity Matrix:

1. High Time pressure, High likelihood of creative thinking –> On a Mission
2. Low Time pressure, High likelihood of creative thinking –> On an Expedition
3. High Time pressure, Low likelihood of creative thinking –> On a Treadmill
4. Low Time pressure, Low likelihood of creative thinking –> On a Autopilot

Tough-minded ways to get innovative

1. Start at the top
2. allow innovation to rise
3. Know the competitive dynamics of your business
4. determine where innovative lives
5. once an idea is well-developed, go for broke

the peril of organizations excessive layering…

the structures, processes and people that keep things ticking smoothly can also cut off the generation of good ideas and can block their movement through the business system. Excessive layers, for example, kills ideas before senior managers ever consider them…. barriers fencing off R&D, marketing, production and finance block up functional problems before it’s too late for effective solutions.

Inspiring innovation… 16 innovation experts give their thoughts on…

1. Make it Norm
2. Put aside Ego
3. Mix up people
4. Don’t fear failure
5. Hire outsiders
6. Abandon the crowd
7. Let of of your ideas
8. Don’t underestimate science
9. fight negativity
10. Ask “What if?”
11. Merge passion and patience
12. outsmart your customers
13. experiment like crazy
14. Make it meaningful
15. Stop the bickering
16. Don’t innovate, solve problems

Research that reinvents the corporation…

1. Research on new work practices is as important as research on new products
2. Innovation is everywhere; the problem is learning form it
3. research can’t just produce innovation; it must “co produce” it
4. Research department’s ultimate innovation partner is the customer

Book Title: The Passion test – Effortless Path to discovering your Life purpose
Author: Janet Attwood and Chris Attwood
Year written/published: 2006
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Summary: Discovering your Passion and creating the life you choose to live
Some extracts:

By William Barclay….

There are 2 great days in a person’s life – the day we are born and the day we discover why.

Intention, Attention, No tension…

Intention: consciously stating what you choose to create in your life is the first step to manifesting it

Attention: Give attention to what you choose to create in your life, and it will begin to show up

No Tension: Where you are open to waht is appearing in this moment, you allow God’s will to move through you.

clarity of what you want…

When you are clear, what you want will show up in your life, and only to the extent that you are clear.

the why… by Neitzsche…

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

7 keys to living life aligned with passion…

1. commitment
2. clarity
3. attention
4. stay open
5. integrity
6. persistence
7. follow your heart

Make a radical change in your lifestyle & begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances & yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, & conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, & hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new & different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security & adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning & its incredible beauty.

— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

There was a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend.?He read the dates on her tombstone from the beginning…to the end.

He noted first came the date of her birth and spoke the following date with tears, but he said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years.

For that dash stands for all the time that she spent alive on earth…?and only those who loved her know what that little line is worth.

It matters not, how much we own; the cars….the house…the cash.
What matters is how we live and love and how we spend our dash.

So think about this long and hard…are there things you’d like to change??For you never know how much time is left that can still be re-arranged

If we would just slow down enough to consider what’s true and real and always try to understand the way that other’s feel. We’d be much less quick to anger and show appreciation more and love the people in our lives like we’ve never loved before.

So, when your eulogy’s being read and your life is being rehashed…would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent your dash?

9 speakers, 5 mins each, 20 slides… 9 ideas…

From the Harvard Business article:

In Leaders:

* Focus on results and deliverable

* Coach and support their people

* Build team spirit

* Offer expert knowledge or share experience

* Monitor performance/quality control

* Are present and available

* Surface and deal with conflict

Out Leaders:

* Get involved in cross-organisational initiatives

* Build networks

* Delegate extensively

* Manage their profiles and visibility

* Engage with peers inside and outside their companies

* Look after their careers

* Engage in organisational politics

* Join committees

* Attend or speak at industry conferences

So how much time will you spend in these 2 categories?

Funny!! and it knocks some sense into you!

Some career advice fromthe CEO of Booz and Company:

He offered 10 career development tips:

1. Pay attention to human capital and who you are as a human being; consider how you think about and construct problems.

2. Get and feed a network. If you only get in touch with people when you need something, it doesn’t work. Be helpful to others as well, even if it’s difficult to take the time and effort.

3. Find mentors. No one is good enough to sort out his problems on his own. Good mentors are the ones who have influenced you and paid attention to you. They not only advocate for you, but they are critical of you as well.

4. Seek diverse experiences and stretch yourself into areas where you are not naturally comfortable. Diverse experience builds character.

5. Be curious about the world and its issues; despite the pain of the financial crisis, it has been an accelerated learning curve.

6. Be interested or else you can’t be interesting. Nothing is worse than a dull dinner companion — you can be interested in anything.

7. Form an educated and distinctive point of view. It helps you make sense of abstraction. Have a worldview to see what forces are at play.

8. Read. At the minimum read a daily financial paper and a dozen good books a year.

9. Look after yourself. Careers are an endurance game and work happens to you more than any other activity.

10. Make time for people you love and who love you. It’s too early to let these people become a subsidiary early in your career. The thing about time is that it is very unforgiving.

Book Title: The Alchemist
Author: Paulo Coelho
Year written/published: 1993
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Some extracts:

There are 4 obstacles:
1. We are told from childhood onwards that everything we want to do is impossible.
2. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream.
3. Fear of defeats we will meet on the path
4. Fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.

But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.

What’s the world’s greatest lie? It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.

The boy didn’t know what a person’s “destiny” was. It’s what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their destiny.

And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.

Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. You’ve got to find the treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense.

All you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation. Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.

Every search begins with beginners luck and ends with the victor’s being severely tested.

Love never keeps a man from pursuing his personal legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love.

As written in Lifehack, there’s a great list of 9 things that we should keep handy:

1. Things I Want
2. Gift Ideas
3. Got a Minute?
4. Watch, Read, Listen
5. BHAGs 
6. Bucket List
7. Don’t Forget
8. Great Ideas
9. Grocery List

Book Title: Positive Action Plan – 365 meditations for making each day a success
Author: Napoleon Hill
Year written/published: 1997
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Some extracts:

2 jobs…

It’s been said that you should always work at 2 jobs simultaneously: the one you have and the one you desire. When you work as hard at the task you want to do as the task you must do, you are preparing yourself for the future. You are learning skills that will enable you to grow beyond your present position … When the time comes, you’ll be ready.

thoughts in mind…

You will never be greater than the thoughts that dominate your mind. Keep up with what’s new in your field and with what’s going on in the world. Make a list of good ideas that you can use anytime you are searching for a creative solution to a problem. Remember, small minds think about things, great minds think about ideas.

decisiveness

Success people are decisive; they don’t agonise over decisions and thereby miss out on a great opportunity. They gather relevant information, discuss alternatives with advisors whose opinions they respect and then make a decision and get on with it.

Book Title: The Mind of the leader – Havard Business Review
Year written/published: 2005
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Some extracts: 

first 6 months…

Major changes in the first 6 months will inevitably be perceived as arbitrary, autocratic, and unfair, as much for their timing as for their content.

followers who agree too much…

…effective leaders can end up making poor decisions because able and well-meaning followers are untied and persuasive about a course of action… Charismatic leaders, who are most susceptible to this problem, need to make an effort to unearth disagreement and to find followers who are not afraid to pose hard questions.

6 ways to counter wayward influences:

1. Keep vision and values front and centre
2. Make sure people disagree
3. Cultivate truth tellers
4. Do as you would have done to you
5. Honour your intuition
6. Delegate, don’t desert

leaders…

The example of Polaroid and Land suggests how leaders think about goals. They are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas instead of responding to them. Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude towards goal. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction a business takes.

5 components of Emotional Intelligence at work:

1. Self-awareness
2. Self-regulation
3. Motivation
4. Empathy
5. Social Skill

Book Title: The Dip – A little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick)
Author: Seth Godin
Year written/published: 2007
Book Source: Google Books, Library
Some extracts:

The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable. Go. Switch. Challenge yourself,  get yourself a raise and a promotion. You owe it to your career and your skills.

3 questions to ask before quitting:

1. Am I panicking?
2. Who am I influencing?
3. What sort of measurable progress am I making?

So, there’s tool number one. If quitting is going to be a strategic decision that enables you to make smart choices in the marketplace, then you should outline your quitting strategy before the discomfort sets in.